Remaking the service station experience with AI-powered, data-driven customer engagement

For big oil and gas companies, retail divisions—gas stations—have always played a critical role in their complex, vertically integrated operations. As the tail end of its downstream businesses, a company’s retail stations aren’t just the outlet for selling its core refined fuel products. It’s also a chance to sell ancillary goods and the primary point of interaction between the customer and the brand. That’s why the quality of the experience at a retail outlet is so important.

While selling fuel remains a central goal, many companies are embracing an expanded vision of the value their retail operations can deliver to their business.

MOL is an integrated oil and gas company with 25,000 employees in 30 countries, and owns over 2,400 service stations in 10 countries.  Today, its transformation focus is on accelerating its journey from a traditional fuel retailer to a digitally driven consumer goods retailer and integrated mobility service provider. MOL intends to delight customers, empower employees and unlock new revenue. To get there, the MOL Group is accelerating hyper personalization in marketing with AI, powered by IBM Consulting® and Salesforce.

MOL customers make millions of loyalty shopping transactions every month. Using this data, MOL wanted to move from a standard, rule-based marketing concept, where all criteria for segmentation are predefined and the content was written in advance. It wanted to become a behavior-based model, where customer signals would be automatically harmonized into a persona profile to which hyper-personalized offers are sent.

The plan included deploying the platform first in Croatia, Slovenia and Hungary and then extending it to Slovakia, Czech Republic and the rest of the countries in the region.

Having conducted an extensive review of their options, Mag and his team saw Salesforce Marketing Cloud as the best fit for their needs. So, the big remaining choice, Mag says, was selecting a systems integration partner to pull all the components together. “We were focused on demonstrable expertise with the Salesforce platform,” he explains, “especially in delivering the kind of comprehensive, large-scale solution we were planning.”

IBM’s collaborative approach gave MOL’s small but growing team necessary support. The product of this co-creation effort is an integrated omnichannel marketing solution, employing the full portfolio of Salesforce components and the IBM® watsonx.ai™ AI studio. The solution relies on a core of real customer behavioral data to orchestrate every facet of MOL’s interaction with its customers, including offering highly targeted campaigns based on each customer’s specific journey. Campaign managers can now generate hyper-personalized emails and push notifications in the needed local language in one click.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud serves as an integration hub to distribute messaging to its customers. MOL uses the Salesforce Experience Cloud as the foundation for its customer portal. To further their marketing hyper personalization initiatives, the MOL team selected Salesforce Data Cloud to connect and harmonize data from Salesforce Marketing, Experience, Loyalty and Sales Cloud, as well as third-party data. The MOL solution also employs MuleSoft to integrate and orchestrate all these components across multiple countries. MOL responsibly uses generative AI (gen AI) capabilities powered by Salesforce Data Cloud and watsonx.ai.

In building the program, MOL and IBM were cognizant of the need to balance scale-based efficiency with the specific needs of MOL’s local marketing teams. Their response, says Mag, was to follow a “group template” approach that provided a common framework, while giving local teams lots of flexibility to design their own campaigns. “Each country has its own marketing and loyalty department,” he explains. “Because we built flexibility into the templates, local teams can tailor and execute their own campaigns and loyalty programs.”

To help jumpstart these local capabilities, Mag notes, IBM also helped establish new marketing and loyalty practices. “As we set up new rewards marketing teams in our local markets, IBM—through its Hyper Care support—played a key role in educating these teams on how to manage the new platform on their own,” says Mag. “This exemplifies the ‘bridge’ of support we were looking for as the program grows and develops.”

Mag further points out that while MOL conceived its expanded digital commerce strategy with an eye on 2030, the results are already becoming apparent. “Among customers using the app, MOL has experienced an average revenue uplift of 15%–30%,” says Mag. “That’s powerful evidence that smarter and more convenient digital engagement is increasing loyalty and driving more consumption.”

Based in Budapest, Hungary, MOL Group (link resides outside of ibm.com) is an international oil and gas company with 26,000 employees and operations across more than 30 countries. With 1,900 service stations across 9 Central Eastern European countries, MOL’s retail business serves 10 million customers, and it processes more than a million transactions every day.